Emergent Narrative Systems with Smith & Twomey

In this presentation, Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey will discuss their collaborative work developing systems for collective co-authorship, speculative world-building, and performative AI. They will describe recent projects including Artificial Rural Imagination for Flyover Country, the AI Radio Play, Cleaning the Stables for the Herakles Project, and the Theater of Latent Possibilities. Together, these projects explore generative AI for real-time performance—creating live, participatory experiences hinging on the improvisatory dynamics of human-machine co-authorship.

Ash Eliza Smith is an artist-researcher who uses storytelling, worldbuilding, and speculative design to shape new realities. With performance as both an object and lens, Smith works across art + science, between fact + fiction, and with human + non-human agents to re-imagine past and future technologies, systems, and rural-urban ecologies. She is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts at UNL. Smith previously attended the Performance Studies program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Visual Arts program at the University of California, San Diego where she worked as an affiliate of the UCSD Design Lab, lecturer in the Culture, Art, Technology program, and a speculative designer in residence for the inaugural Birch Fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. https://asheveryday.com/

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer exploring poetic intersections of human and machine perception, particularly how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, ISEA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. He is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts with the Johnny Carson Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an Artist in Residence with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, UC San Diego.  https://roberttwomey.com/